Among the British Library manuscripts recently made available online, the earliest is the parchment codex Add. MS. 17210 + 17211. The codex as it stands now was made up from three older codices. The original texts in these earlier codices were written in Greek and have been overwritten with chapters of a treatise by Severus of Antioch (c. 465-538, patriarch 512-518) in a Syriac translation. Leaves from the original codices were turned sideways and folded over to make a new codex.
Manuscript 17210 consists of 60 folios preserving (as its lower text) part of Homer’s Iliad (remains of books XII-XXIV). The text is written in one column to the page; the script has been dated to the sixth century AD. The scribe copying out the text of Severus used only some of the leaves from the Iliad codex.
Manuscript 17211 has two distinct parts, comprising leaves from a codex of the Gospel of Luke (folios 1-48), and leaves with books X and XIII of Euclid’s Elements (folios 49-53). The manuscript is known in New Testament criticism as Codex Nitriensis, the codex from Nitria (the Nitrian Desert, Wadi el-Natrun, in Egypt). The copy of Luke has chapter titles (folios 1-3) followed by chapters 1-23 (with lacunae). These texts are written with two columns to the page.
According to the British Library website the copy of Luke is dated to the sixth century (could it be earlier?), Euclid to the seventh or eighth (could it be sixth or seventh?), and Severus to the ninth century.
The treatise by Severus is against Johannes Grammaticus. Chapters I-VIII are written over Luke, VIII-XX over Homer, and XX-XXI over Euclid.
According to notes on folio 49 of MS. 17211, the codex was acquired by Daniel, bishop of Edessa, when he was a periodeutes; and he bequeathed the book to a monastery at Sarug. On folio 53 is a note which gives details of the copyist of the Syriac text. The British Library website notes that the codex was later in the possession of the Monastery of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Nitrian Desert). The manuscripts were acquired by purchase in 1847.
The name Codex Nitriensis may in other contexts signify a quite different manuscript.
Homer: P9; LDAB (Leuven Database of Ancient Books) 2231. Ed. W. Cureton, Fragments of the Iliad of Homer from a Syriac Palimpsest, London, British Museum, 1851 (see pp. v-viii on the provenance and acquisition of the codex). M.J. Apthorp, ‘New Evidence from the Syriac Palimpsest on the Numerus Versuum of the Iliad’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 110, 1996, 103-114.
Euclid: LDAB 7468; Mertens-Pack 0368.1.
Luke: Transcribed by S.P. Tregelles (1854) and C. Tischendorf (1855); edited by Tischendorf, Monumenta sacra inedita, vol. 2 (1857), pp. 1-92. Registered as R; 027. Cf. van Haelst, Catalogue (1976), no. 400; LDAB 2892. Tischendorf’s Monumenta sacra inedita (6 vols., 1857-1870) are accessible online at the Internet Archive.
